The National Water Master Plan

Objectives

Without water, there is
no life. Individuals, private companies and public institutions are taking
great efforts to make water useable for their needs - be it drinking water,
pastoral needs, industries, agriculture or others. In order to coordinate these
activities, and to safeguard that the resources are also available for future
generations, a common planning framework is needed. This framework is given by
the Water Master Plan.

According the United Nations,
the primary objective of a Water Master Plan is to establish a basic
framework for:

orderly
and integrated planning and implementation of water resources programs and
projects; and

a
rational water resources management consistent with overall national socio-economic
development objectives.

(Guidelines for the preparation of National Water Master
Plans, Water Resources Series No. 65, UN, N.Y. 1989)

Background and Principal Components

The Formulation of a Water Master Plan
is a principal task of the state. In the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, this task
is performed by the Ministry of Water and Irrigation. The old Masterplan from
1977, which had been formulated with assistance the German Government, needs to
be updated and revised. Again, the German Agency for Technical Assistance (GTZ)
is supporting the Jordanian Government in this task.

The new Masterplan will
not be a static printed document but a Digital Water Master Plan based
on an extensive Water Information System (WIS).
In close cooperation with the Ministry of
Water and Irrigation and GTZ, the German consulting company AHT International
has developed the Digital Planning Tools. These software tools are
database applications with a GIS (digital mapping) interface that are applied
to:

Assess the present availability, withdrawals, losses and uses of the water resources;

Formulate alternative development scenarios for water resources and demand/use at various planning horizons;

Perform the balancing of resources versus demands for the recent past as well as for the alternative development options and

Identify technical and operational options in order to bridge the gap between resources and demands.

Basic components and functionality of the Digital Masterplan

Water Information System (WIS)

The Digital Water Master Plan receives
its data from the Water Information System (WIS). This is the central
information system at the Ministry of Water and Irrigation, serving the
Ministry as well as WAJ (Water Authority of Jordan) and JVA (Jordan Valley
Authority). In addition, it is the authorised source for data on water
monitoring, management, and planning for external users like research
institutions or international donors.

The WIS is a complex system of hard- and software, data
and tools as well as people for its operation and maintenance. It can be
accessed from all computer workplaces within the Ministry’s network. The
majority of data is either stored in ORACLE data base tables or in GIS files.
These two data systems are linked, thus permitting both the data selection by
inter-active maps and cartographic representation of results.

The WIS contains monitoring data collected in the field
either by operators of the water supply and wastewater disposal systems (namely
WAJ and JVA), the hydrological service of the Ministry and/or external
institutions like the Department of Statistics and the Ministry of Agriculture.
In addition to the monitoring data the WIS holds the results of water demand and resources
projections.

In order to facilitate
data exchange, a unified coding compulsory for all water authorities is under
development. This process is coordinated by the Working Group on
Standardization of Data and Information Flows.

General overview of the structure of
digital information in the Ministry of Water and Irrigation

The two primary user
interfaces of the WIS are the Data Entry and Visualisation Application
(DEVA) and the Digital Visualisation System (DVS). The DEVA (written
under Oracle developer) is both used for data entry and the production of
reports in a fixed format.

The
DVS is specially made for the master plan allowing to produce
standard information products in an automated way. It is an MS-Access
application with integrated MapObjects GIS modules for spatial selection and
cartographic outputs. The DVS is applied to monitoring and forecast data to
produce standardized tables, charts and maps under Excel. Thus, its results can
be easily post-processed with Office software.

Examples of user-interfaces of the DVS software

Digital Planning Tools

The Digital Planning
Tools are a set of interactive software modules applied to forecast water
resources and demands for future development scenarios. These forecasts are
always using recent monitoring data as a starting point. The results are stored
into the so-called Scenario Tables Pool (STP), which is part of the central
ORACLE database administered under the WIS. From there, the information on
future resources and demands is taken for nation-wide water balancing.

Principal data flow – from the pre-processing modules to
balancing

The Digital Planning Tools have been
developed under MS-Access 2000 in VBA (Visual basic for Applications), the most
common programming language under the Windows operating system. The Digital
Planning Tools have a modular structure and the software code is open to the IT personnel in the
Ministry. This will allow future modifications and extensions with the
Ministry’s own resources.

Examples of user-interfaces of the digital planning tools
for resource estimation

Example of a user-interface for
demand estimation (irrigation)

Digital NWMP

A Water Master Plan as a document is consisting of the following principal parts:

The description of the water resources (surface and ground water plus alternative resources) in quantity and quality

The description of the present and likely future development of water demands by different user sectors;

The presentation of the technical (physical) and operational water management measures to fulfil the demands in their temporal and spatial distribution under consideration of social, environmental and economic aspects.

Due to the complexity of
the task, a master plan is structured in several layers like executive summary,
main report (in several volumes) and various technical annexes and appendices.

A digital master
plan is such a document in digital or electronic format. This has several big
advantages: portability (the whole document fits to a CD-ROM) and easy
navigation within and between the various parts and layers of the document.
Most important, however, is the facility to easily update the document.

To obtain that functionality, two
additional features are required. First, the document must have a standardized
structure of small individual units linked with each other. It was agreed to
use in principle the system-independent file formats HTML (hyper text mark-up
language, which is commonly used for Internet web pages) and PDF (portable
document format). Secondly, an additional software shell is required to convert
the “raw documents” into the agreed document formats in order to integrate them
into the overall structure of the digital master plan.

General document concept of the
screen version of the digital master plan

IV. From the Planning &Management Unit (PMU)

IV. Others

Royal Scientific Society,
Ministry of Agriculture, Department of Statistics, Ministry of Planning,
Ministry of Tourism, Yachiyo Engineering - Japan, BGR - Germany, EMWIS
(Euro-Mediterranean Information System on the Know How in the Water Sector),
ARD - USA, Richard Allen

This document was prepared in September
2002 by the staff of the Water Sector Planning Support Project at the Ministry
of Water and Irrigation. It was co-financed by the Federal Republic of Germany
within the framework of the Jordanian/German Technical Cooperation Programme.